


Painful Anniversaries

by FictionPenned



Category: Hannibal (TV)
Genre: F/F, Whumptober, Whumptober 2020
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-10-06
Updated: 2020-10-06
Packaged: 2021-03-07 16:20:18
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,572
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/26860531
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/FictionPenned/pseuds/FictionPenned
Summary: Indeed, Alana almost turns away, almost speeds back out the door as quickly as her body and her cane will allow, but a voice at the top of the stairs grinds the impulse to a sudden halt.“I’ll take it from here.”To Alana’s waiting ears, Margot’s words are a song. They weave a melody born of salvation and friendship and the bond of shared trauma.Written for Whumptober 2020 Day 18: Broken Heart
Relationships: Alana Bloom/Margot Verger
Comments: 3
Kudos: 16





	Painful Anniversaries

In the wake of her defenestration, Alana was branded a _survivor_. She was thrown into the lion’s den and emerged alive, though not intact. Half of the bones in her body were broken. There were shards of glass lodged in her back and her skull. Even now, a limp clings to her footsteps with the single-minded veracity of a second shadow. Though she has moved on from the wheelchair, a cane lurks beneath her closed fist, supporting her weight and forging the path ahead. People move out of her way when she walks by, they offer to carry her things and hold doors open for her, and after those fleeting moments of kindness, they hide nefarious, insidious whispers behind raised hands and cupped palms and talk about how she slept with a cannibal and found herself thrown out a window for her troubles. In response, she wears suits like they are armor and keeps her spine as straight as possible and allows her gaze to flit past the offenders as if they don’t exist. She half believes that if she ignores them long enough, they’ll vanish back into the darkness that had spawned them. As a strategy, it is demonstrably poor, but it is her last hope for something that at least _resembles_ normalcy.

True normalcy, however, seems to lurk just beyond her reach.

Every time she closes her eyes, she sees the faces of the dead parading by. Abigail Hobbs, Beverly Katz, a dozen bodies brutally mangled beneath an artist’s hands. Beneath _Hannibal’s_ hands. She mourns not only for the deaths of her friends, but the metaphorical death of a man who has been her mentor and her colleague and her lover. She trusted Hannibal. She ate at his table. She quoted his works in front of full lecture halls. She opened her heart to him and assumed that he opened his in return.

She thought she loved him, but the man that she loved was a front, an artifice, a mask meant to disguise the monster that lurks just beneath the surface.

A shudder wracks her body at the thought, leaving a trail of echoing pain behind. A long trail of medical professionals have repeatedly told her that neither the emotional damage nor the physical damage are likely to heal themselves all the way, that she should brace herself for a life of chronic pain, but that, too, is a difficult reality to confront. She has always been stubborn, convinced that she knows not only what’s best for herself, but what’s best for everyone else around her.Of course, her intentions have always been noble, but given the benefit of retrospect, that arrogance was incredibly misguided. She owes many, many people an apology — colleagues and friends and students alike — and as a result, she has caught herself falling into a bottomless pit of hopelessness and self-pity on a great number of occasions.

Getting out of her car is a slow process preceded by a great many deep breaths — steeling herself against both the oncoming wave of hurt and the pervasive, suffocating weight of her cowardice — but in the end, she manages it. As soon as she’s on her feet and in public view, she sets her face into a mask of professional distance and slams the door shut.

The path to the front door of the Verger mansion is long, and she takes the stairs one at a time, pulling herself up with the twin efforts of the cane and her tight grip on the railing.

She raises a hand to knock, but a butler preempts the noise and ushers her inside.

“Are you here to speak to Mr. Verger?” he asks. He, too, is professionally masked — voice and expression devoid of anything that might betray his opinion of both the visitorand his employer.

“No, actually,” Alana replies, offering up a close-lipped smile that strains the tight bounds of courtesy. “I’d like to see Margot, if she’s here today.”

“Miss Verger is not taking visitors.”

Alana leans forward ever so slightly, the weight of her body driving the tip of her cane into the floor. “I think she’dagree to see me.” Her brush with death may have robbed her of her sense of normalcy, but it has not robbed her of her stubborn nature.

There’s a brusque nod and a heel turn, and as soon as those blank eyes are no longer fixed upon her, Alana sways as though she might collapse, struck by the enormity of her fear and worry and general sense of loss. She came here to have someone to talk to, but she gets the sudden sense that she ought to have cleared out some of her baggage before she came, ought to have compartmentalized a bit in order to avoid overwhelming her acquaintance with the brunt of her complaints.

Indeed, she almost turns away, almost speeds back out the door as quickly as her body and her cane will allow, but a voice at the top of the stairs grinds the impulse to a sudden halt.

“I’ll take it from here.”

To Alana’s waiting ears, Margot’s words are a song. They weave a melody born of salvation and friendship and the bonds of shared trauma.

Against her better judgement, both tears and a smile fight their way out from behind her carefully manicured mask, and she hides them from the butler by stepping past him and beginning her slow journey up the stairs. Margot, to her credit, races down the stairs to offer support, wrapping an arm around Alana’s waist and another bulwark against the perils of a wrong step. They have done this dance before, and they will no doubt do it again — a dozen future meetings in abandoned rooms, beneath the very nose of a man with the power to ruin them both should he discover the depth of their relationship.

“You didn’t tell me you were coming,” Margot remarks once they are safely within the walls of her rooms. They preemptively locked the doors behind them to make sure that they have a bit of warning before Mason swoops in to interrupt them, as he almost always does. The man need to control and terrify the people around him is both chilling and uncanny, and Alana has thought more than once of raining vengeance down upon him. It is not a course of action that she would have considered before the bloodbath in Hannibal’s home, but her fall changed her. She’s been rebuilt, reforged, stitched back together in a joyless facsimile of her previous self.

She takes a deep breath as she considers Margot’s question. “It’s my anniversary.”

Margot cocks her head, eyes curious. “I didn’t know you were married,” she says. There’s a lofty edge to her words that colors the statement as a dry joke.

“The anniversary of that night. Of when Hannibal —“ Alana swallows, unable to complete the sentence. She strives to project a certain strength, to pretend that she is largely unaffected by the trauma that plagued her, but there are moments when the dam breaks and sorrow and fear finally spill forth.

The dam has not yet given way, but it teeters on the brink of failure.

She flounders for a moment, trying to find the right words to summarize her grief without cutting too deeply. She is a psychologist, she ought to be good at remaining clinical, even when the pain is her own, but her skills have grown rusty during her injury-induced sabbatical.

The frustration with language only serves to deepen her hurt, to make it more profound, to press against the walls that hold back the tide of tears. The corners of her eyes grow wet, and Margot takes a step forward, wiping a tear away with the soft pad of her index finger.

“You’re free to be yourself here,” Margot says. “I won’t judge.”

For a moment, Alana almost laughs — a chuckle caught deep in her throat — but a second later, it is completely drowned in a sudden rush of tears. It has been a long time since Alana cried properly. It’s been a long time since she allowed herself to grieve. It’s been a long time since she let herself feel anything at all. Within the walls of the hospital, nothing seemed real. She was convinced that she was in purgatory — held together by pins in a world that consisted of nothing but clinical whiteness and a steady stream of nurses that commented on her courage. It took time for the loss to sink in, to understand both the price that she had paved and to comprehend the fact that she lost both a lover and a pseudo-daughter in a single, fell swoop.

Alana has mourned alone before, but she has never mourned in the company of someone else.

She sinks to the floor, collapsing beneath the weight of her grief, and Margot sinks with her.

There are no platitudes, no false promises, no meaningless quotes about how everything in life happens for a reason. Sometimes life is cruel and meaningless and horrible, and people are cruel and meaningless and horrible. Margot understands that better than most, and that is why she has become Alana’s safe harbor.

They are two broken, angry, sad people clinging to each other for dear life, and it is the only thing that feels right in the hostile, uninhabitable world in which they’ve found themselves.


End file.
